A long term care bed at a nursing home costs anywhere between $5500 to $20000 monthly. There are many rich, retired people who would have their finances depleted in a few years with a cost that high.
The average middle class individual would never be able to afford that so the fall back is usually medicaid.
What you are saying is generally true. The only real oversight in ensuring things are moving forward is us ourselves as patients. It’s our responsibility as patients to take charge of our health.
That being said, P2P is sadly a standard aspect of American medical practice. Essentially anyone in a direct patient contact position position has done them. In the clinic or hospital, it may be your primary clinician handling it but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. It can be handled by other clinical staff or a group of nonclinical doctors also.
You dont have to worry about P2P since it will get taken care of (whether the service will be covered by insurance is another story). Instead I’d focus on keeping disconnected parts of the system abreast of your medical conditions and current list of medications. Because health information is protected there really isn’t a great solution for centralizing this data yet so if you go to a clinic that’s on a different EMR, they’re not going to have all of the necessary information available to them.
This is advice for doctors, not patients.
Usually doctors do the peer to peer and then the patient can appeal once services are denied (which is almost always the case if you’ve reached the peer to peer stage).
I’ve used this before with mild succees. It’s far from reliably effective. You’re more likely to get the decision over turned at the appeal stage, the problem being that precious time is lost while going through that process.
I do like to schedule an appointment so that patients are part of the peer to peer call. That way they can tell the doctor, nurse, PA, NP or whichever other service reimbursement bouncer the insurance company has hired that they’re putting a curse on them and their family.
Generally the hospital has checks and balances to prevent fraudulent billing (well not in this case, apparently).
My bigger issue with the RVU system is how it promotes sub sub specialization into procedure based specialties which are the antithesis of preventative medicine. The system valuee family medicine doctors the least despite the massive shortage in their services (especially in rural communities).
So, the surgeon that fixes the broken hip gets paid more than the doctor that gets the bone density scan done and starts meds that support bone health. The cardiologist that opens up the blocked vessel gets more than the PCP who takes the time to counsel on athersclerotic cardiovascular disease and controls risk factors medically and with lifestyle.
I’m not saying the surgeon / proceduralist shouldn’t get paid more. I’m just saying that when your system incentivizes ‘wait for the problem to happen and then fix it’ you’re going to have some bad health outcomes.
Bill Gates’ net worth has grown substantially despite his philanthropy, rising from $126.8 billion in early 2023 to $156 billion in December 2024.
Regarding COVID-19 vaccines, Gates actively opposed patent waivers and influenced Oxford University to privatize its vaccine through AstraZeneca rather than keep it open-source. He pushed for maintaining intellectual property rights through COVAX, despite public funding supporting vaccine development.
Not a good guy by any metric.
Any examples?